Be Inspired!

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our
concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that
reality. ~ bell hooks.

If I can’t dance…I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
~ Emma Goldman

Let us rise in the moral power of
womanhood; and give utterance to the voice of outraged mercy, and insulted
justice, and eternal truth, and mighty love and holy freedom. ~ Maria Weston
Chapman

Feminism is hated because women are
hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political
defense of women hating. ~ Andrea Dworkin

The fundamental impulse of the movement
is neither masturbatory nor concretely lesbian—although it of course offers
warm house to both these possibilities; it is an impulse to maidenhood—to that
condition in which a woman might pretend to a false fear or loathing of the
penis in order to escape from any responsibility for the pleasure and
well-being of the man who possesses it. ~ Midge Decter

Men who want to support women in our
struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically
important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop
the crimes of violence against us. ~ Andrea Dworkin

I myself have never been able to find out
precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever
I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. ~
Rebecca West

Well behaved women rarely make history ~
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

If they don’t call you a lesbian, you’re
probably not accomplishing anything. ~ Chris Kramarae and Paula Treichler, The
Feminist Dictionary

Women are all female impersonators to
some degree. ~ Susan Brownmiller

Women are not inherently passive or
peaceful. We’re not inherently anything but human. ~ Robin Morgan

Whatever women must do they must do twice
as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. ~
Charlotte Whitton

I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde
jokes because I know I'm not dumb—and I'm also not blonde. ~ Dolly Parton

If high heels were so wonderful, men
would still be wearing them. ~ Sue Grafton

When women are depressed they either eat
or go shopping. Men invade another country. ~ Elayne Boosler

In politics, if you want anything said,
ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman. ~ Margaret Thatcher

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice
on how to combine marriage and a career. ~ Gloria Steinem

Nobody can make you feel inferior without
your permission. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

A male gynecologist is like an auto
mechanic who never owned a car. ~ Carrie Snow

The phrase "working mother" is
redundant. ~ Jane Sellman

You [men] are not our protectors. …If you
were, who would there be to protect us from? ~ Mary Edwards Walker; physician
and POW of the Confederate Army

Feminist politics aims to end domination,
to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can
live in peace. Feminism is for everybody. ~ bell hooks

A natural response is to change the word
feminist to a word with fewer stigmas attached. But inevitably the same thing
will happen to that magical word. Part of the radical connotation of feminism
is not due to the word, but to the action. The act of a woman standing up for
herself is radical, whether she calls herself a feminist or not. ~ Paula Kamen,
feminist

We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask
that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United
States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever. ~ Susan B. Anthony, 19th-
& early 20th-century leader of the Women's Movement

I used to go on college campuses 25 years
ago and announce I was a feminist, and people thought it meant I believed in
free love and was available for a quick hop in the sack. ... Now I go on
college campuses and say I'm a feminist, and half of them think it means I'm a
lesbian. How'd we get from there to here without passing "Go"? ~
Molly Ivins

Feminism is a recognition of the
domination of men over women and attempts by women to end male privilege.... It
is a theory, a method, and a practice which seeks to transform human relations.
~ Cynthia Orozco, writing in the anthology Chicano Voices: Intersections of
Class, Race & Gender, 1993

Feminism is the radical notion that women
are human beings. ~ Cheris Kramerae, author of A Feminist Dictionary, 1996.

Feminism has fought no wars. It has
killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies,
practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for
better working conditions.. for safety on the streets... for child care, for
social welfare...for rape crisis centers, women's refuges, reforms in the
law." (If someone says) 'Oh, I'm not a feminist,' (I ask) 'Why? What's
your problem?' ~ Dale Spender, author of For the Record: The Making &
Meaning of Feminist Knowledge, 1985

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the
equality and full humanity of women and men. ~ Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms.
Magazine, leader of the Women's Movement

A feminist is a person who answers
"yes" to the question, "Are women human?" Feminism is not
about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it's
certainly not about trading personal liberty--abortion, divorce, sexual
self-expression--for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life
feminists propose. It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range
of human experience. It's about women consulting their own well-being and being
judged as individuals rather than as members of a class with one personality,
one social function, one road to happiness. It's about women having intrinsic
value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others:
fetuses, children, the "family," men. ~ Katha Pollitt

I'm not a feminist, but... I appreciate
the right to help choose my government representatives. I enjoy the option of
wearing pants or shorts if I want. I'm pleased that I was allowed to learn to
read and write. It can be very convenient to control how many babies I want to
have. It's awfully useful to be able to open a bank account and own property in
my name. I like knowing that my husband or boyfriend cannot legally beat me.
It's really swell to keep the money that I earn. ~ poster from One Angry Girl

One is not born, but rather becomes, a
woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

Man is defined as a human being and a
woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to
imitate the male. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

Representation of the world, like the
world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of
view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

The world has never yet seen a truly
great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very
fountains of life are poisoned at their source. ~ Lucretia Mott

If God is male, then male is God. The
divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the
human imagination. ~ Mary Daly

Tokenism does not change stereotypes of
social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary
impulse. ~ Mary Daly

Women have had the power of naming stolen
from us. ~ Mary Daly

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men and women are created equal. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

It is not that women are really
smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever,
man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded,
protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and
weakened by it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There is no female mind. The brain is not
an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver. ~ Charlotte Perkins
Gilman

African women in general need to know
that it's OK for them to be the way they are -- to see the way they are as a
strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence. ~ Wangari Maathai

If I had to characterize one quality as
the genius of feminist thought, culture, and action, it would be the
connectivity. ~ Robin Morgan

We are the women men warned us about. ~
Robin Morgan

My idea of feminism is
self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to
become herself, and do whatever she needs to do. ~ Ani DiFranco

I am a feminist because I feel
endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe
that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history
when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have
become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included. ~
Adrienne Rich

No woman is really an insider in the
institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to
believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable
by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the
angry grandmothers, the shamanesses, the fierce marketwomen of the Ibo's
Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silkworkers of prerevolutionary
China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and
burned as witches for three centuries in Europe. ~ Adrienne Rich